Open Call "Hiroshima MoCA FIVE 25/26"
Works
Itai Minako, Shintaro exists- and that dog does too., 2025
Itai Minako
Shintaro exists- and that dog does too. Special Jury Award
In my neighborhood, there is a person who talks to an AI chatbot they have named Shintaro, and another who shows the scenery to a stuffed dog as if it could really see it. These actions create a sense of wavering between reality and illusion.
In the basement storage area of Municipal Motomachi High-rise Apartment, things left behind over long periods, which people are unable to let go of, quietly pile up. Traces of life and the community’s history, unable to fully come to an end, have been displaced and lie dormant. When confronting these dust-covered fragments, residents’ narratives seep into the boundary between reality and illusion and rise into view, as if forming images. When we face these dust-covered fragments, residents' narratives soften the lines between reality and illusion, rising like images taking shape before our eyes.
In this work, “something that is undeniably there” takes the form of an installation of drifting shadows, maintaining a certain distance. It spreads like ripples from the underground to the surface, from individual contours to societal layers, softly illuminating them.
In addition, through interviews with residents, I stage performances in which I embody their speech patterns and gestures, as if possessed by them. By blurring the space between “the Hiroshima that should be preserved” and “the Hiroshima left untold,” the work quietly absorbs these elements within itself, embracing textures that cannot be fully contained in words.
Alongside narratives of the atomic bombing and reconstruction, as well as voices speaking of love with an AI and the lives of stuffed animals, the presence of Hiroshima’s people, who continue to take in overflowing events and emotions, underpins the structure of this work.
Usui Hitomi, Trees with Kezurikake, 2025
Usui Hitomi
The Branch of the Shelf, The Breath of the Pillar, Trees with Kezurikake Hiroshima MoCA Award
In recent years, I have been reworking wooden objects—tools and furniture that people once used—using a unique technique called Kezurikake. This method involves carving while leaving fragments of wood intact, revealing the wooden object's memory of being a tree while also connecting to the former owner's memories. This practice has led to projects in Akita Prefecture in 2022, Norway in 2025, and now here in Hiroshima.
Through the act of Kezurikake, the life phenomena of the wooden object in its former state as a tree are reinterpreted. Its form returns, as if sprouting leaves, while its original function as a wooden object fades. Episodes shared through conversations with owners document people’s relationships with wood in their devoted everyday lives, historical information, and memories.
Focusing on Kezurikake—which appears and vanishes by chance during woodworking, akin to faith—and directing our gaze toward wooden objects that have fulfilled their purpose are ways of revisiting what has fallen from the center of consciousness and been pushed to the periphery. It is a spiritual practice of restoring intimacy with the things we keep close, or embracing a sense of loss.
The wooden objects and memories gathered in Hiroshima for this exhibition teach us about the forests that remain in our lives, and the forests that carry meaning shaped over time.
Uruno Kei, 26rooms , 2023 (reference)
Uruno Kei
40rooms
40 rooms constructed from structures modeled after stage and film sets are connected by multiple ducts, forming a single large assemblage, like a machine or an urban landscape. Timer-controlled fans installed in each duct exhaust and circulate the air within the rooms. In addition, structures based on pipe organs are integrated into the ducts, converting the flowing air into sound that resonates throughout the entire exhibition space. The interiors of the empty rooms are entirely gray, abstract, and inorganic, symbolically representing a fictional world with an ambiguous sense of scale.
When imagining memory, I often picture something like air trapped inside a box, as suggested by expressions such as “putting a lid on it.” Memory is an elusive presence—fragmentary yet systematic, ambiguous yet distinct, variable yet unchanging. By conceiving of this abstract memory as “invisible air,” and through the room as a box as well as the process of air transforming into sound, I attempt to make its contours emerge and to structure memory itself.
Kuwana Sae, Nagasaka Emu, Our cloud chamber, 2025
Kuwana Sae, Nagasaka Emu
Our cloud chamber.
In preparation for Our Cloud Chamber., We, the artists visited the exhibition venue on October 20 and conducted an experiment using a diffusion cloud chamber to render radiation visible. The process was filmed, and the resulting materials form the basis of the work. A cloud chamber is an experimental device invented by physicist Charles Wilson, recipient of the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics. Radiation is present everywhere on Earth, but because it moves rapidly and has a short wavelength, it is normally invisible, and even when successfully made visible using a cloud chamber, it vanishes within seconds. We have linked these fleeting traces of mist to the human perceptual faculty of memory. We believe that this experimental act takes on particular significance in Hiroshima, a place marked by the memory of the atomic bombing. In order to capture and communicate both the act of perception through which humans remember and the physical uncertainty of memory, which loses its form the moment it is shared with others, we employ deliberately ordinary methods such as weaving and modeling.
We, Kuwana and Nagasaka, are artists who have each spent roughly 20 years engaging with materials and substances, primarily ceramics in Kuwana’s case and iron in Nagasaka’s, working chiefly in three-dimensional forms. In our respective practices, we have encountered material reactions that appear to deviate from socially defined concepts of time. Since last year, we have been collaborating on experiments to capture these material responses and exploring unprecedented modes of expression.
Hong, Jun-Yuan, YiFang—The Return of Memory, 2025
Hong, Jun-Yuan
YiFang—The Return of Memory
YiFang—The Return of Memory traces the life of Yi-fang Lin, the grandfather of the artist’s wife, through the interweaving of memory, history, and landscape. The work follows his experiences studying in Japan during the period of Japanese colonial rule and surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Using historical maps of Hiroshima and Chiayi from the 1930s as a point of departure, the exhibition reconstructs the spatial contexts in which Lin once lived and studied. The artist visited Hiroshima with his wife to follow her grandfather’s footsteps, giving concrete form to personal memory through school records, correspondence, disaster victim certificates, and fieldwork footage. Lin Yi-fang and Tomiko Shoji, a Taiwanese survivor of the atomic bombing, followed parallel paths: their childhood homes stood next to one another, and both went on to study in Hiroshima during their youth. The artist later traveled to the United States to visit Minori, Shoji’s daughter, obtaining archival materials related to the atomic bombing along with manuscripts, thereby extending the inquiry into memory across regions and generations. The exhibition also brings to light the long-overlooked history of Taiwanese atomic bomb survivors through an interview with Professor Takayuki Kawaguchi of Hiroshima University. In the final section, a prose-like film draws these elements together, responding to reflections on family memory and history.
Special Jury Statement
In its second year, Hiroshima MoCA FIVE 2025 received applications from 280 artists responding to the theme of “Memory,” with five ultimately selected. The 80th anniversary of World War II’s end and the city of Hiroshima served as key points of reference for engaging with this theme, and many proposals addressed it in one form or another, either directly or indirectly.
Uruno Kei’s work, whose sound carries beyond the exhibition space, takes the form of a pipe organ, linking 40 rooms of different sizes into a layered spatial structure that brings to mind Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s The Prisons series. Each room is fitted with connected pipes and fans, but when all the fans are operating the sound level becomes overwhelming, so in practice roughly half are kept switched off. While the work is extraordinarily polished in terms of construction, its inability to operate at full capacity left me wishing for a clearer explanation for the choice of 40 rooms and a more direct engagement with the theme of memory.
Taiwan-based Hong Jun-Yuan traced the path of his wife’s grandfather, who lived in Hiroshima during the period of Japanese rule, and examined the wartime experiences and memories of Taiwanese atomic bomb survivors. Over several years and repeated visits to Hiroshima, he produced a dense and complex installation comprising the semi-documentary video YiFang, in which his wife’s father performs the role of her grandfather; the essay film backlit, which follows her grandfather’s 1,680-kilometer journey while layering photographs and archival materials accompanied by the artist’s narration; and a range of documents and interviews. Focusing on the wartime experiences and atomic bomb memories of Taiwanese people in Hiroshima, a subject that has rarely been addressed, makes this project well matched to an open-call exhibition of this kind. At the same time, the limited scale of the exhibition space and the volume of information presented made it difficult to grasp the work as a whole.
Upon entering Usui Hitomi’s installation, the tone shifts to a brighter setting, enveloped in a calm and poised atmosphere. Usui borrowed implements that Hiroshima residents no longer use and, through the technique of Kezurikake, carved away parts of each object, negating its original function as a tool while giving it a renewed sense of living energy. After the exhibition, the tools are returned to their original owners, allowing memory to be passed on. This project addresses questions that contemporary society needs to consider—how things are brought to an end, how they are set aside, and how they can be renewed— and it holds clear value as a shared undertaking. I look forward to broader forms of engagement from this artist in the future.
Using a diffusion cloud chamber, Kuwana Sae and Nagasaka Emu made radiation within the exhibition space visible and captured it on video. Alongside this footage, they presented a group of plaster sculptures that they jointly modeled based on fleeting moments of radiation that disappear within seconds, as well as a large net-like sculptural form woven using fishing-net techniques, as if to catch what slips away. Radiation is often envisioned as a set of straight lines, but by focusing on the instant of disappearance, the artists gave tangible form to its rich, organic qualities, creating a setting that elicits reflection on memory at a planetary scale through the presence of radiation. Their collaborative approach, in which each artist brings their individual strengths and superimposes them together, showed clear potential for continuation and further development.
Hiroshima-based Itai Minako has carried out a wide range of activities in the large public housing complex where she lives, a 50-year-old high-rise apartment building home to residents of many generations and nationalities. For this exhibition, she brought into the museum numerous objects of unclear ownership that past residents had left behind over many years in the complex’s underground storage areas. She then presented a performance in which memorable episodes she had heard as head of the neighborhood association were allowed to inhabit her, as she not only recounted the stories but also channeled the speakers’ manner of speech and gestures as if possessed. This public housing complex has qualities that could warrant preservation as a cultural asset, while at the same time it is a place marked by aging infrastructure and a range of social challenges. Itai responds to the issues faced by residents with humor and creativity, attempting to transform them into value for the future. Rather than simply engaging with contemporary issues, her practice seeks to guide memories of the past toward future possibilities, and while much remains unknown about how this will be achieved, it shows considerable promise and offers a hopeful vision of art as a way of shaping a better life.
Looking back at the exhibition as a whole, a wide range of techniques, materials, and media were brought together, from sculpture and craft-based methods to video and project-based practices. Many of the works incorporated sound, and artists of varying ages and career stages intermingled in complex ways. This could easily have resulted in an exhibition in which the works competed with one another and asserted themselves too strongly, but instead it formed a rich setting in which disparate elements respected one another’s presence and resonated together. I imagined that the artists developed positive relationships with one another, making the exhibition a productive and rewarding site for each of them. It was an exhibition in which the unexpected encounters and delightful overlaps characteristic of an open-call exhibition were fully on view.
Hattori Hiroyuki
Curator
Associate Professor, Tokyo University of the Arts
Director, Aomori Contemporary Art Centre
